Dexter
is looking for someone to frame for the Trinity Killer murders, to draw
police attention away from the real killer (Arthur Mitchell), so
Dexter can kill him himself.

Looking through
a list of Lundy's previous suspects, Dexter settles on a trucker named
Stan ("The Man") Beaudry, who got away with murder on a
technicality. Dexter plans to kill Beaudry and frame him for the
Trinity killings.

So he goes to
Beaudry's house at night - which turns out to be a sheet metal shack "in
the middle of nowhere" - on a lot littered with industrial junk. But
Beaudry is not at home.

Looking inside
the shack, Dexter finds a CB radio still
blasting, and a calendar indicating that he is on a truck delivery to Jacksonville.
He decides to go to Jacksonville to kill him.

We see the shack
again when Dexter returns there (after killing Beaudry at a truck
stop, and after stealing a few personal items from Trinity's house)
and plants evidence there, including the hammer
Arthur used to kill a man, plus a toothbrush, a razor and a comb with Arthur's
DNA (which the police already have on file from the Trinity murder scenes).

We see the shack
again, later in the same episode, when the police arrive, and Masuka discovers
the toothbrush & comb - and Debra discovers the hammer... just as Dexter
had planned.

Q.
What is it actually in real life?

A. A large tract
of semi-vacant land, with lots of palm trees and some oil wells. But not
near Miami.

Q.
Where can I find it in real life?

A. This tract
of land is located on the northeast side of Pacific Coast Highway,
at 2nd Street, in Long Beach.

The land lies
behind (north of) the In & Out Burger
at 6391 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long
Beach. The exact spot where they filmed the scene is about
400 feet behind (north of) the fence off Westminster Blvd/2nd Street (at
approximately 6775 Westminster), just east/NE of Shopkeeper Road.

It's the same
field used for the scene where
Trinity's son, Jonah, bashed in his father's car with a baseball bat. But
that earlier scene was shot about 1,200 feet to the west (closer to Pacific
Coast Highway), on the same large parcel of land.

In early California
history, what is now Los Angeles was divided up into a series of huge cattle
& sheep ranches. Much of the land that makes up Long Beach was
originally part of the sprawling Bixby Ranch. When oil was discovered in
the L.A. area, oil wells sprouted across Southern California. Most of that
once-empty land has been developed and/or sold by now. But this patch of
Bixby land remains mostly vacant, and contains a number of oil wells, oil
tanks & small out buildings - spread out amidst an overabundance of
bushy palm trees, growing in oasis-like clusters across the property.

Since the property
already looks like "the middle of nowhere", all they had to do
was bring in an outhouse (to sit next to the shack), and perhaps rearrange
the industrial items scattered around the area. (They also put up a long
blue screen to limit the view of what is behind the shack.)

Unfortunately,
since this is private property, and is fenced in, I was unable to go to
the exact spot where the scene was filmed, so I had to settle for shooting
a few generic photos of the property from the parking lot of "In & Out
Burger".

But I was able
to pinpoint the exact location by using Bing aerial photos, and you can
see that spot via the links below, as well as in a Google StreetView panorama.

Here is an aerial
photo of the land, with the location of the shack marked. (I
also marked the location of the previous scene, with Trinity's son.) And
here is a map
link.

Here
is a Google StreetView panorama of the buildings, shot from Westminster
Blvd, just north of Shopkeeper Road.

I
shot the photos below (from the In & Out parking lot at
2nd & PCH) in November 2009.

[
Warning: This is fenced private property, not open to the
public. No trespassing. ]

Q.
How the heck did you figure out where it was?

A. This
was puzzling for a while, but since I had already discovered this Long
Beach field (for the scene with Trinity's son,
Jonah), after viewing the trucker's shack scenes again, I began to
suspect that they might have shot it in the same field.

The clincher
came in the very last shot in the final scene, as Dexter drives away from
the shack in his car, you get a brief view of the entire field, including
a bushy palm tree similar to those seen in the Jonah scenes, and distant
buildings in the background that I knew they might be part of the MarketPlace
shopping center (on the other side of Westminster Blvd).

So I went to
Bing's Bird's-Eye aerial photos and searched the property for the
unusual slanted outbuilding seen in the scene as Stan's shack. Near it,
in the scene, we can also see a distinctive, open iron framework - right
next to the outbuilding. So finding that unusual combination of landmarks
wasn't that difficult.